Once we expiate our sadness, sophisticated New Yorkers know what to do: We change the channel. It's the Oscars and the Olympics and The Gates. Gee, it's too bad about those firefighters who jumped to their deaths in the Bronx, huh?

At the funerals for the two men who died from their falls after being trapped inside a building, no one from the firefighters' union was gauche enough to hand out copies of a letter that Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta and Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster wrote to The New York Times last year. It was a day, after all, to be respectable, the most insidious form of obsequiousness.

The Mayor's commissioners wrote that "illegal conversions of buildings kill people." City records show that Ms. Lancaster's agency had full knowledge that the Bronx building where the two firefighters died had outstanding violations. Ms. Lancaster's people had been to the site for more than a dozen complaints, yet we are now asked to believe that none of her staffers noticed the partitioned apartments, renting for $100 a week (cash preferred), that forced the firefighters to choose between being incinerated or jumping four stories and hoping to survive.

Mayor Bloomberg, the technology Mayor, has yet to figure out how to transmit information about such violations to his firefighters before they enter a potentially dangerous building. It's not complicated and it costs nothing. The courageous men and women of our Fire Department are sent into these buildings on a regular basis, first without the proper ropes and safety equipment, but then without even so much as a computer printout of outstanding violations.

So what is a firefighter's life worth anyway? The families of firefighters killed on 9/11-remember the radios that didn't work on that terrible day?-received around $1 million each. In the Staten Island Ferry accident of October 2003, which killed 11 people, the city has sought to limit its liability to just over $14 million.

As the Mayor prattles on about running the city like a corporation and preens himself over the millions of calls to the city's information line, 311, his pet peeve is the amount of money paid out to the families of those who die thanks to the city's negligence. Why, if it weren't for those ambulance-chasing lawyers, the city would be in much better financial straits. "Down with the lawyers!" is the billionaire's mantra, even as his kingmaker turned lobbyist, former Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari, is suing the city to collect more money for the relatives of those who died in the ferry disaster. Over $2 billion in claims have been filed as a result of the accident.

But the disgrace of the firefighters' deaths in the Bronx is that Ms. Lancaster's minions knew about these death traps and did nothing except write a summons. In April, her chief of staff told City Council Minority Leader Jim Oddo that there are "thousands" of such buildings in the five boroughs, but there wasn't much the agency could do about them. (The agency is so bad that Mr. Bloomberg hired a $400,000 consultant last year to study corruption.)

It's not just Ms. Lancaster and Mr. Scoppetta who have ignored this time bomb. In October 2003, the Mayor himself, after telling Staten Island residents to report illegal buildings, was told about homes that had been carved up into illegal apartments. The owner of one such firetrap is a 35-year-old police officer who retired on disability. The Mayor said that he personally "reads 311 summaries every week" and, if nothing is done, he calls his commissioners.

Ms. Lancaster sent her inspectors; they wrote a summons. Eighteen months later, the fine hasn't been paid. The owner hired a Republican lawyer close to Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro, a Bloomberg supporter. The retired cop brags to his neighbors that he has "clout" and that "nothing will ever be done" to close him down. So far, he's been proven right.

If a blaze ever erupts in his building and a firefighter dies as a result, we will surely hear the sad songs again. Until, that is, something far more important-a tennis match, perhaps-distracts us once more from thinking about how to prevent the death of our city's princes.

The stadium, planned for the site in the West 60's where Donald Trump ultimately built his luxury housing, would've had 110,000 seats, and Jack said it could easily be accommodated for football, making it a three-for-one deal. Jack also envisioned the stadium as the venue for 1960 Olympics.

His idea was ridiculed by the owners, as was the suggestion by Robert Moses that the Dodgers move to Flushing, where Shea Stadium now sits. "We wouldn't be the Brooklyn Dodgers then," bellowed the team's owner, Walter O'Malley, as he packed his bags and laid claim to 300 acres of city-owned land in central Los Angeles.

Having learned nothing from our past, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is asking Manhattan residents to accept a football stadium for the New Jersey Jets-a team which also fled the city-and their 78,000 white male suburban fans.

The Jets and the Giants both left town years ago because their owners, Leon Hess of the Jets and the Mara family of the Giants, decided they simply weren't rich enough; nor were they content with sell-out crowds at Shea and Yankee stadiums, respectively.

Let's leave aside the strangling debt service ($42 million annually for 30 years) on the city's share of the $600 million cost of building a platform on which the new stadium would sit. Let's also leave aside the traffic and environmental nightmares that a West Side stadium would generate.

What's missing from the debate is how Ed Koch (yes, the same Ed Koch who now wants to lure the Jets back from the Meadowlands) was willing to pay off the Jets to stay in New York-but they wanted more! In 1983, Mr. Koch put $43 million on the table to renovate Shea for the Jets, and he even promised them a totally unnecessary domed stadium. Mr. Koch is the guy who negotiated the $13-million-a-year welfare check-by waiving real-estate taxes-for Madison Square Garden's owners when they threatened to move the Knicks and Rangers (but not the arena) to New Jersey. This was at the same time he was closing Sydenham Hospital in Harlem for budget reasons.

What's also being overlooked in the Jets debate is the history of sports stadiums in New York. Until 1972, when John Lindsay was running for President and making nice with CBS, which owned the Yankees, many sports teams built their own parks with private money-not yours. Indeed, the Upper East Side beer baron Jacob Rupert dug deep into his pockets to build Yankee Stadium in 1923.

When Yankee Stadium was being renovated, at an eventual cost of $100 million (Lindsay's "ballpark" figure was $24 million), four teams shared Shea. The Yankees, Mets, Jets and Giants all played there in 1975, and there is no reason why the same thing can't happen again-in Queens. Sure, the Giants seem content in New Jersey-they've proposed building a new stadium (what's wrong with the one they have now?)-but the Yankees, Mets and Jets are all looking for new facilities.

Jets owner Woody Johnson is wealthy beyond anyone's imagination (except the Mayor's), as are George Steinbrenner of the Yankees and Fred Wilpon of the Mets, both of whom want your money for their private companies. Their teams are among the most valuable sports franchises in the country. They play in stadiums that, while owned by the taxpayers, still retain names that can easily be auctioned off for tens of millions of dollars, like cities across the country have done in naming their parks after banks and orange-juice companies.

All the Mayor has to do is call Snapple or another of his favored City Hall companies and get them to write the check.

The football Giants also played in the Polo Grounds, as did the Mets and the forerunner to the Jets, the New York Titans. Yankee Stadium was used for boxing matches, Negro League baseball and papal masses. The Beatles played Shea.

An all-purpose park can be built on city-owned land in Flushing in a couple of years, accessible to mass transit and highways, with private capital, just like in the good old days when Mayors built housing and hospitals and schools, not stadiums.

When millionaire ball players aren't using the place and whining about their underpaid status, the kids in our schools can use it for concerts and to learn how to paint, write music and have a good time in a stadium subsidized by their parents.

But how bad was it really? So a pro-war Democrat who tap-danced his way around issues like gay marriage and national health insurance had been outmaneuvered by the evil axis of the "moral"-majority Republicans and those in Iowa worried about the next terrorist attack on the ethanol crop.

It's important to put things in perspective and look back to a time when far scarier things have happened.

The year of my first vote, 1968, some anti-war activists were deciding whether to vote for Dick Gregory for President. (We were protesting, you see.) Luckily, I had an immigrant father who had toiled in union halls and proudly wore the label of what was once called a "yellow-dog Democrat," meaning that he would vote for a yellow dog if it was running against a Republican. Protest in the streets, not the voting booth, he said. "Put aside your anger about the war; Nixon is a thief." He instructed me, gently, to vote for Hubert Humphrey, which I did.

You want to know about despair? When Dr. Martin Luther King died in 1968, there was burning and looting across America. Bobby Kennedy was gunned down two months later. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were mimicking George Wallace, competing to see who could mastermind the best "Southern [white] strategy."

Lyndon Johnson already had decided to give up the Presidency. He lied about the reasons for getting us into war, became "the Mad Bomber" and obliterated a country. Most "progressive" Democrats-then as now-were silent.

We have since survived Nixon and his Plumbers and the Christmas bombing of Cambodia. We lived through Gerald Ford telling the city to take a hike in our moment of need. Jimmy Carter made the requisite South Bronx campaign stop but did nothing to help our town rebuild.

Ronald Reagan, the "affable" charmer, was cruel in his attitudes toward cities, except the one where he opened his 1980 campaign to get across his obvious code-worded message: Philadelphia (Mississippi, not Pennsylvania).

The sainted Franklin D. Roosevelt interned Japanese-Americans during World War II. F.D.R., in fact, veered toward megalomania when he sought to "pack" the Supreme Court by expanding its membership. He appointed Hugo Black, a former K.K.K. member, as a justice. Later, Black wrote in his diary that he was afraid President Nixon might "become a dictator and cancel the 1972 elections."

In New York, we made it through the summer of 1977, during which we endured anarchy in the streets after the blackout and the Son of Sam rampage.

We can blame the Bible-thumpers in the red states, but we have plenty of homegrown intolerance. There was little outrage when a local man of the cloth said white "interlopers" didn't belong in Harlem. The next day, a follower burned down Freddy's Mart, killing seven people. The minister who uttered the pernicious words was given a prime-time speaking spot at the Democratic National Convention: Al Sharpton.

A portion of the blame for the Bush victory, to quote another scribe, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, the proud residents of a blue state.

We like to fool ourselves that "moderate" Republicans like George Pataki, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg will do the right thing by us, like getting the $20 billion in federal aid promised us after 9/11, even as they muck around in the right-wing politics of our local Republican party.

Democrats all over New York voted white in 1989 when a black man ran for Mayor, and they gave his opponent 80 percent of the vote in some districts-something that no previous Republican had ever managed.

Ed Koch set the standard for betraying his party in 1965 when he endorsed the patrician Republican John Lindsay for Mayor over Abe Beame, a man who'd been raised in poverty on the Lower East Side. Mr. Koch and Mr. Giuliani, who served 20 years between them, had, by design, horrible relations with blacks.

In 1969, liberal Democrats dumped their candidate for Mayor, Mario Proccaccino, and backed Lindsay because Proccaccino had the temerity to talk about law and order. It wasn't a good time for "ethnics" to run for Mayor: Lindsay's "moderate" deputy mayor hired a private detective in a vain effort to show that another Italian-American candidate for Mayor in 1969, Republican State Senator John Marchi, was in the Mafia.

We have managed to muddle through all these disappointments. Mr. Bush's victory is no excuse for political paralysis and moaning for the next four years. There are 16 House seats and five Senate seats to take back two years from now.

In the words of another immigrant, former New Yorker Joel Emanuel Haggland (you might remember him as labor's troubadour, Joe Hill): "Don't mourn. Organize."

A few weeks ago, The New York Times used the phrase "stoic commuters" to describe how New Yorkers reacted to maddening three- to four-hour delays in their morning schlep to work. The foul-ups highlighted the Mayor’s inability—three years after 9/11 and one year after the great blackout—to come up with an emergency plan to deal with natural or man-made disasters.

As you know from reading the newspapers, busy spinning the excuse du jour of the Pataki-Bloomberg appointees to the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the cause of this fiasco was rain.

Yes, plain old rain—as distinguished from an earthquake, a hurricane with 150 mile-per-hour winds, a tornado or a mudslide. Rain that had been predicted for three days. And rain that has fallen on a regular basis since the subway opened in 1904, with trains that ran faster than they do today.

Which brings us to the core of the problem.

An M.T.A. flack spun the story that many of the subway’s pumps are 70 years old and were not designed to handle so much rain. He told half the story. According to sources in the M.T.A., some of the pumps are actually 100 years old. Try to imagine Bloomberg L.P. using typewriters built in 1904. But that was only part of a problem that accounted for a $95 million hit on the city’s economy—a figure described by an unnamed city official (one guess) as "paltry." The other dirty little secret of the bean-counters in City Hall is that the Mayor’s underlings cut back the number of sewer drains cleaned every year, which is why you saw photos of flooded streets in Soho, not far from the Mayor’s proposed football stadium for the rich.

Welcome to Olympic Village.

The ancient pumps that did work—we will leave aside those that didn’t—were actually sending water into clogged sewers. There was nowhere for the water to go except back down to the subway tracks.

The Mayor was impatient, as always, with whining New Yorkers. (They must have momentarily forgotten that they are Stoics.) "The delays were 10 minutes at best," he lectured. Clearly, he had not taken his beloved No. 6 train that day or peered out a City Hall window at the Brooklyn Bridge, which was swamped with "commuters" walking to work. Later, he was forced to say that his previous statement was inoperable, but no one in the press corps asked him why he hadn’t gone on television to tell us just how bad it was.

And it wasn’t just the subways. Outer-borough workers sat on buses for up to three hours on highways that were gridlocked; there were no M.T.A. bosses to tell drivers to take the buses off the highway. The cops who arrested bicycle riders to placate visiting Republicans were nowhere to be found directing traffic, closing off streets or rerouting behemoth tractor trailers. Manhattan workers watched one empty bus after another traverse cross-town streets while overloaded downtown buses just kept passing them by. There were no announcements on the trains except that perfectly modulated voice apologizing for the "unavoidable delay."

City Hall management, anyone? Yes, you Stoics—in the Orwellian double speak of government these days, every delay is "unavoidable." But the chief bean-counter actually crowed last week about his management style: His minions hassled us with a record 9,997,000 parking tickets!

Those 70-year-old pumps were installed in the IND subway line, which opened in 1932—a mere seven years after construction began. In all likelihood, they were built by some benefactor of Mayor Jimmy Walker, the rascal Tammany sachem who admitted to spending $2 million on himself and his sycophants over seven years. He wrote songs, once asked his lawyer if he thought Diogenes "was on the level," gave us Sunday baseball, battled the Prohibitionists (who in those days targeted drinkers, not smokers) and made the town laugh. That is, until the October 1929 Wall Street crash, when we discovered the ramifications of unbridled corporate (not municipal) greed.

But walk around the city and you will see our globetrotting Mayor’s name, James J. Walker, on plaques attached to firehouses and schools and courthouses—but not to baseball or football stadiums.

You are free to remember that he was the last Mayor who actually built a subway line with pumps that still work.

And free to think about the difference between being a Stoic and a non-complaining mope. Call 311.

State Comptroller Alan Hevesi, in an audit released last summer, said Bronx-based Tristar Patrol Services was one of seven firms that billed the state more than $4.4 million for services they didn't perform. (Private companies supply security at state facilities ranging from the Department of Motor Vehicles to the Workers Compensation Board.) The findings were referred to State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Tristar is being audited by the New York Secretary of State.

In a survey of 17 Tristar employees, Mr. Hevesi found that none was in compliance with the requirements for urine drug screening and that 82 percent didn't have alien-registration forms on file. Of the 17, eight were not registered with the New York Department of State, as required by law.

Mr. Hevesi also found that 88 percent of the Tristar employment files sampled by his staff had no proof that the security officers took basic guard training, which includes fingerprinting. Failure to provide training is a violation of the New York State Security Guard Act. Also, failure of an employer to have an alien-registration form on file is a violation of federal laws.

Mr. Hevesi said that "state facilities, employees and the public they serve were at risk because guard-company managers provided dozens of guards to state agencies, including the state Division of Military and Naval Affairs, who may have been convicted felons."

City Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall issued a statement saying that her agency does not independently verify the information that is submitted by Tristar, including whether criminal-background checks were performed on the guards. But Mr. Hevesi admonished state agencies to do precisely the opposite. "We caution [state] managers not to rely on certificates of compliance [from employers] as proof that guards are qualified under the contract. The managers should establish a system to ensure each guard meets all contract requirements," Mr. Hevesi said.

Mr. Hevesi warned that "quality guards are essential to sound security in New York State, especially after the World Trade Center attack. Despite the increased security risk, [state managers] have chosen to seek and accept guards with reduced qualifications. The more the specifications are relaxed, the higher the risk for problems."

Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for the Mayor, said that Tristar was outbid by two other companies for city work, but the competitors were disqualified because they didn't have enough experience or proper references.

Mr. Hevesi's report said that Tristar's contract with the state was terminated after the Office of General Services discovered that there "wasn't enough evidence" to support claims that the guards were qualified at the level the company claimed. "Although officials at O.G.S. asked Tristar managers for evidence to support the fact that guards were qualified, Tristar didn't supply it," Mr. Hevesi said.

The comptroller examined the records for 12 Tristar employees working for the O.G.S. "Executives at Tristar gave the [O.G.S.] statements certifying that ten of these twelve guards were qualified at various levels," the audit stated. This, the audit said, gave office managers "a sense of security that the guards were qualified." The comptroller's office, however, found that there wasn't enough evidence to support those claims.

One state official said that the company "was almost impossible to reach." The Observer had the same problem. The number listed on the company's incorporation papers in Albany was disconnected, and another number supplied by a city official gave a busy signal for an entire day.

Ultimately, after interviewing several guards, The Observer found a number not in the D.O.T.'s files and left a message for Tristar's director of operations, Gary Zimmer. Mr. Zimmer did not return The Observer's calls.

The ferry became the focus of front-page headlines in early August when the U.S. Attorney announced the indictments of ferry workers resulting from last October's crash, which killed 11 people. The pilot at the wheel when the accident occurred, Richard Smith, entered a guilty plea on manslaughter charges.

Meanwhile, problems at the ferry persist.

During a recent visit to the ferry terminal on Staten Island, The Observer spotted Tristar guards buying coffee and newspapers at 9:25 a.m., with a terminal full of commuters waiting for the next boat. Not all the guards were equipped with radios or walkie-talkies. Few carry guns.

One bomb-sniffing dog, from another security company, was doing tricks for tourists last week under the guidance of his trainer. The tourists were shouting, "Lay down! Sit up! Roll over!"

Officials described the program as a one-year "boot camp" open to CUNY students. Boot camp? What a wonderfully charming phrase to describe what is needed now more than ever in our city: a boot camp for the new working class, the financially challenged, debt-strapped recent immigrants who don't have what my generation had-a free college education at CUNY with teachers who challenged us every day to think.

The first move that CUNY officials announced, however, was a major disaster, and hopefully will not portend plans for the curriculum. They said they were looking for campus space in midtown Manhattan, which is already crawling with journalists who aspire to become toadies for the people who run the city and country.

CUNY has campuses throughout the five boroughs in the most diverse of neighborhoods, and that's where aspiring journalists can find out about the real New York, far away from the vacuous glitterati of midtown Manhattan. That's where our journalism students should study, at one CUNY campus a month.

Beyond the traditional journalism classes taught from textbooks, the assigned readings should be every major book about New York City over the last 50 years, including but not limited to The Power Broker and Gotham . Students, in return for free tuition (paid for by the media conglomerates that make billions in profits every year), will be required to sign a pledge promising they will never write one word about Donald Trump, Michael Jackson, Barry Bonds, Woody Allen, models, actors and actresses, Al Sharpton and all the other annoying media hounds who hog far too much space in our newspapers.

They will be given a free house on Governors Island, within walking distance to a golf course, swimming pool, gymnasium and spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline-but only if they promise to stay in town for the next five years and irritate those in power. In the process, they will overcome the stereotype that A.J. Liebling once wrote about the media: "You can buy most reporters in New York with a beer and a cheap steak."

They must start their day by annoying the Mayor, the Governor, the City Council Speaker, every elected official and every executive assistant to the deputy mayor-just on general principle. The courses will be taught for free by reporters who are not yet burned out and cynical and who still believe that one person can make a difference (please, no mail from the professors' unions-you will still have plenty of work). It will be their way of giving something back, as a partial payment in honor of their immigrant parents and the mentors who helped them along the way.

In return for free space on the idyllic island (they can also write about why the Mayor still hasn't figured out how to use it, years after the federal government gave it to us for a buck), they will give up the perks that destroy the creativity of writers. No free eats and booze at the nightly openings, and definitely no appearances on those insipid New York 1 cable shows.

Our CUNY recruits will never write about Candice Bergen and Lorraine Bracco being "police commanders" for a day; instead, they will grill Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, asking him why he insists on hobnobbing with these people at crime scenes as the debate about whether we are prepared for another terrorist attack swirls around him.

They must have a heavy dose of economic theory, so they don't wind up like the "reporters" who were outclassed on that topic in May during a debate with Stuyvesant High School students. This will help them in explaining the various flimflams of Wall Street and city leaders.

One of the courses offered, according to the CUNY administrators, will be "how to spot a story." That is the easiest part. It's called taking the subway every day to the end of the line and walking around; reading the Law Journal , to see who is suing whom, and the City Record , to see how the Mayor is selling or leasing your land; attending community-board meetings, where the rubber hits the road on civic issues. Turn off the TV and read the weeklies; they have more information about our neighborhoods and their changing ethnicity in one issue than all the dailies combined.

Of course, there is one major dilemma with all this theory about how to cover the real news of our city, the news that affects all eight million of us.

Where would any of it get published?

The table was in the hearing room of the old Board of Estimate chamber, where citizens were permitted to testify on any calendared item. Today, that room is the much-touted Mayoral "bullpen," where the public is most assuredly not welcome and where the opinions of ordinary folk are held in contempt while decisions are made in secret, guided by the whim of the Mayor.

As those public meetings dragged on late into the evening, a borough president (Donald Manes comes to mind) would battle with then-Mayor Beame and his budget director over a pet project that was in danger of being derailed by the municipal bean-counters. "What are you complaining about, Abe? It's federal money," Manes would protest. "If we don't spend it, we will lose it!"

Today, the ghost of Donald Manes, who killed himself in 1986, haunts Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station and other places where suburbanites gather.

Thanks to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who helped repeal the commuter tax at a cost to the city of nearly $500 million a year, these suburbanites are no longer required to pay less than $450 a year on an income of $100,000, and-worse-the city is about to spend billions to make their lives more comfortable.

The difference between then and now is that those federal dollars at least had some benefits that accrued to New Yorkers. Today, the rush to spend seems designed to help out-of-towners and developers.

Let us count the ways that downtown is being "developed" with federal money as we approach the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority wants to build a $750 million Fulton Street transit center to connect 13 subway lines and, just coincidentally, construct an underground mall-thereby draining the city's streets of life-that will connect to the underground mall at the new World Trade Center, when and if it ever gets built.

The Port Authority wants to whisk New Jersey residents to a subway so they are not inconvenienced by having to actually walk on a city street. Cost: $2 billion. Meanwhile, the Port Authority, controlled by Governors George Pataki and James E. McGreevey, is spending your toll money on newspaper ads inviting New York companies to leave the city and lease space in Jersey City, in buildings built with more of your toll money.

Lower Manhattan landlords, stuck with 17 million square feet of empty office space, are lobbying for a downtown connection to the Long Island Railroad and the John F. Kennedy International Airport, as if that's the reason why companies and people don't move downtown. Cost: $6 billion.

Mr. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg want to spend at least $6 billion for what is called the "East Side access" project, a plan to save Long Islanders 10 minutes by having their trains stop at Grand Central instead of Penn Station. Add another $2 billion for the extension of the No. 7 line, which is nothing more than a train to the Olympics.

The total estimated costs for these deals is nearly $17 billion, which of course doesn't include the costs of mob and labor payoffs and consulting fees to Al D'Amato. How that money will be spent is anybody's guess. You want numbers and progress reports? Under the leadership Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and the businessman Mayor, Mr. Bloomberg, it has taken nearly 11 years to rebuild the South Ferry terminal after it was destroyed by fire, an above-ground job that is millions of dollars over budget.

Deutsche Bank is getting $166 million to tear down a building on Liberty Street, while $350 million in surplus funds from the Battery Park City Authority-where maintenance fees have risen more than 30 percent in some apartments since 9/11-will be used to build a football stadium, which will gobble up $600 million in city and state funds. How many football fans live on the West Side of Manhattan?

Liberty Bonds, supposedly to be used to revitalize downtown, are being proposed for a New York Times tower in midtown, a power plant in Queens and a new basketball arena in Brooklyn. Are New Yorkers benefiting from these projects?

It is a pretty safe bet that the Mayor and the Governor will be standing at President Bush's side in August, praising his commitment to spending $20 billion to rebuild our town, while looking out for their well-born big-business supporters and white suburban voters.

The shameless flag-waving will not bring one more customer to a downtown restaurant, and will do nothing to improve the lives of people who actually live in New York City.

At a time when his C.I.A. director was telling Congress that Al Qaeda has copycats ready to strike at America, Mr. Bush had the Coast Guard on alert-not to inspect container ships that might be carrying dirty bombs, but to turn back Haitians who were fleeing economic and political ruin. The Haitians, it seems, are not in the same category as Castro-hating Cubans, who are welcomed here and who quickly become Republicans.

Ignoring the fact that no Haitians flew airplanes into the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, even the Department of Homeland Security got into the act, coordinating efforts to prevent the Haitians from seeking respite on our shores.

This is not the first time that a President has used the Coast Guard to deny refugees a safe haven. Franklin Roosevelt issued orders to have U.S. ships accompany the S.S. St. Louis , en route to Cuba and packed with 937 European Jews escaping Hitler, as it sailed from Hamburg and passed our shoreline in 1939.

New York realtor Egon Salmon, who was 15 at the time, vividly remembers being turned away from Cuba and watching as the Coast Guard shadowed the ship, making sure that nobody swam to shore. "It is a difficult emotion to describe," he told The Observer. "I was with my mom, my sister and cousin. Most of us thought we were going back to a certain death." Indeed, more than half the passengers eventually died at the hands of the Nazis after the ship was forced to return to Europe.

A year before, F.D.R. had addressed a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution as "my fellow immigrants," a reminder that the women, whose forebears could be traced back to the Mayflower , all came from some other place: "The Uprooted," as historian Oscar Handlin called them in the title of his 1951 book about immigration.

Handlin's book should be placed in Republican goodie bags at their convention in New York this summer, where nice white folks and a few showcased minorities will be busy passing resolutions on such important national-security issues like a constitutional ban on gay marriage, another distraction that Mr. Bush has chosen to spread hatred throughout the land.

The Haitian announcement apparently is part of the G.O.P. strategy for this year's Presidential campaign. Strategists call it "appealing to your base," and in the case of race, it can be traced back to 1965, when a prescient Lyndon Johnson, signing the Voting Rights Act, told an aide, "We have just lost the South for generations." Richard Nixon understood this all too well in 1968, when he ran on a thinly disguised appeal to George Wallace voters, appealing to the "Silent Majority." Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani understood it in New York. Mr. Koch spoke out in favor of the death penalty and against "poverty pimps" in 1977. During Mr. Giuliani's eight years in City Hall, "America's Mayor" refused to speak to many black elected officials. Ronald Reagan knew it in 1980 when he opened his campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., and spoke about "states' rights."

Of course, Mr. Bush is no stranger to lowering himself to appeal to his "base." He spoke at Bob Jones University in the 2000 campaign, a place that bars interracial dating and had a rabid anti-Catholic bigot at its helm. For that, he received a mild rebuke from Catholic Republicans like Peter King of Long Island, who so far has been silent on the Haitian immigration issue-a strange stance for someone who lobbied to allow the president of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, into this country in 1994.

Mr. King and Governor Pataki, whose grandparents were Hungarian immigrants, should be telling the President to change his Haitian policy. They should be making powerful speeches, convincing their constituents, challenging them to study their own history as boat people.

Mayor Bloomberg should be heard from as well. He is our temporary trustee of the immigrant dream in City Hall. We are a great town because of those who came before us-escaping death or economic deprivation. We haven't always lived up to the standards that we talk about every July 4; indeed, Jews and Catholics had to suffer under Peter Stuyvesant, who was a bigot in every fiber of his being.

Messrs. Pataki and Bloomberg can no longer have it both ways when it comes to the Republican Party. They should be standing outside the G.O.P. convention handing out copies of the Emma Lazarus poem. Once you get past the part about "wretched refuse," she memorably sums up the country and our city: "I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door." It doesn't say: "No Haitians need apply."

The youth, Timothy Stansbury, was black. The cop who shot him, Richard Neri, is white. Sixteen of the 23 grand jurors were black. We don't know the names of these sane men and women who cleared Mr. Neri.

But the grand jury's decision didn't stop racial arsonists from demanding that the officer be prosecuted on federal civil-rights charges, as if he were a reincarnation of Birmingham Police Chief Bull Connor. It didn't stop Congressman Charles Rangel from making a truly contemptible statement, saying that white suburban cops are "not suitable" to patrol black neighborhoods. Never mind that their uncommon heroism has reduced crime in those very same neighborhoods. What would happen if white suburban politicians said that black cops from the city shouldn't patrol their streets?

Lost in the discussion was Officer Neri's assignment: He was patrolling the roofs of housing projects. That's where young knuckleheads fire their latest weapons of individual destruction, sell drugs and use pit bulls to terrorize working people. It's a pretty safe bet that neighborhood residents don't care where a cop lives if he or she is protecting them from cretins.

The racial arsonists are, of course, entitled to their rage, but their arguments ring hollow when they compare the Brooklyn shooting to the Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo cases. Mr. Louima was sexually assaulted by a cop, Justin Volpe, in a police station house. Mr. Volpe, who is doing 30 years for his crime, was prosecuted by the very same district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, who is now being accused of incompetence.

Diallo was shot 41 times by trigger-happy cops-truly an "unjustified" shooting and a classic police overreaction. The Brooklyn case doesn't remotely compare to those two events.

New Yorkers of good will are entitled to wonder how many members of the "Get Neri" squad can remember the names of the two black undercover cops, James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews, who were shot to death in March 2003 by four thugs. How many of them made a condolence call to the dead men's families, held a demonstration or called for a civil-rights investigation?

The pernicious words from Mr. Rangel, uttered on the steps of City Hall with former Mayor David Dinkins at his side, were reminiscent of what destroyed Mr. Dinkins' Mayoralty. He catered to the likes of Sonny Carson during the Korean-grocery boycott and offered an appalling lack of leadership during the Crown Heights riots. It has left him with a chip on his shoulder.

When you get past the searing anger of Mr. Rangel and Mr. Dinkins, they raise an interesting conundrum, which is the efficacy of enforcing the residency requirements for city workers. Would it be better if all city workers lived in the five boroughs? No doubt, but the rules are skewed. Teachers can live in New Jersey, but firefighters can't-but they can live in Chester, N.Y., 60 miles from midtown. Cops can live 120 miles away in Montauk, but not across the Hudson in Hoboken. City bus drivers are allowed to live in the Poconos.

As somebody who believes city workers should live here, I have softened a bit when I see housing prices of $480,000 for a two-family house in Staten Island that five years ago sold for $250,000-a price that even then was far out of reach for the average city worker.

Not many fair-minded New Yorkers would argue if Officer Neri had his gun taken away, but there is plenty left for him to do in fighting crime. He would have good company among members of the "bow and arrow" squad, named for cops on restricted duty for one reason or the other.

Officer Neri, who has a 12-year unblemished record, should not be fired, prosecuted, or tarred and feathered. He can continue to serve the city from behind a desk. Or maybe he can land one of those truly important police jobs-the kind doled out by the politicians in the department to reward their cronies. Maybe he can be assigned to guard the ballplayers' private parking lot at Yankee Stadium, serve as a chauffeur for police brass, or place barriers along sidewalks for parades. Or-here's my favorite-maybe he can patrol the Verizon buildings to protect private property during a strike. Of course, the cops are union members, too, or is that something they think about only at contract time?

Officer Neri, the Stansbury family and our city have suffered enough. A public flogging of Mr. Neri won't do, since he has already had his share of media lashings.

Joe Conason will return next week.

The ferry mystery, and the way City Hall has handled it, stands in stark contrast to other recent incidents involving city workers. "We will not tolerate a cover-up," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when a firefighter was severely injured in a brawl with a colleague on New Year's Eve. Indeed, the next day the alleged offender was arrested and, last week, the captain in charge of the firehouse that day was forced to retire and fined $90,000. (The captain originally said the injured firefighter was hurt in an accident, not a fight.)

When a police officer killed a teenager on the roof of a Brooklyn apartment house two weeks ago, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said within 10 hours that the shooting was unjustified. The next day, the cop's photo was on the front page of the tabloids, guilty until proven innocent.

But the day after the ferry crash, the Mayor said it would take a year to find out what really happened.

Investigators are still trying to determine the exact whereabouts of the doomed boat's captain, Michael Gansas, at the time of the accident. A crucial piece of evidence-the captain's log, which Mr. Gansas had to sign at the beginning of his tour-was turned over by city Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall to the National Safety Transportation Board.

The city is devoting time and energy to checking on the residencies of ferry workers, who are not permitted to live out of state. But Ms. Weinshall has yet to announce the results of any investigation into a far more serious subject: the complicity of New York shipping companies in providing fake "sea papers" for ferry workers.

Meanwhile, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, the king of the weekend press conference on topics ranging from cell-phone portability to gift-card fees, has yet to say a word about the ferry crash, even though a federal agency, the Coast Guard, has some regulatory powers over the ferry. The Senator, of course, is married to Mr. Bloomberg's transportation commissioner. Could that have something to do with the long delay?

Although the assistant captain of the ferry, Richard Smith, fled after the accident took place, he has not been arrested for leaving the scene of an accident. But the Mayor promises that he will chase down anyone who is "urinating on your doorstep," as he said last week when he was forced to admit that his staff had released phony figures-off by 100,000-on the number of "quality of life" summonses issued last year.

Sources tell The Observer that at least two ferry supervisors face indictment, mainly because they failed to follow city safety rules, including the one mandating that the captain and the assistant captain should be in the pilothouse at the same time. That wasn't the case with Mr. Gansas and Mr. Smith during the deadly journey across the harbor on Oct. 15. Left unexplained is what will happen to their supervisors.

Just two weeks before the fatal accident, Ms. Weinshall and Mr. Bloomberg were aboard a Staten Island ferryboat. Did they notice if there were one or two people in the pilothouse? One of Ms. Weinshall's deputies was spotted regularly in the Manhattan ferry terminal, where the ferry pilothouses are clearly visible as the boats pull into the dock. Did he ever report anything untoward?

After the crash, Ms. Weinshall assigned her staff to ride the boats to make sure that ferry workers were all at their assigned stations. Now Mr. Bloomberg wants to spend another $1.4 million to extend the contract of a maritime consultant charged with improving ferry safety-a task that would take any competent administrator about two days.

Anyone who thinks the ferry has changed since Oct. 15 should stop by the Manhattan ferry terminal, where they will find every fire exit locked-a violation that would close down any nightclub in town. Such a violation puts the lives of thousands of commuters at risk and is a contradiction of the Mayor's crusade to reduce legal claims against the city.

A visitor this week found that the deckhands and the city's anti-terrorism cops were back to pre–Oct. 15 normalcy: hanging around the snack bar and not patrolling the boat.

As the ferry pulled into the dock in the darkness of a cold winter night, a deckhand had one hand on the security gate and the other on his cell phone, chatting away. Despite the "equal opportunity" mantra touted by Mr. Bloomberg on a regular basis, female passengers found a locked women's bathroom with a sign claiming that there was no money to pay for an attendant.

The men's bathroom, which was open, had no such sign.